by Jean Findlay
Not yet demobilised, he was employed every day at the Imperial War Museum cataloguing the photographs he had supervised in France. The Army recommended him for a staff job if his health improved; a report advised he was ‘possessed of initiative, quick-witted, a hard worker and good disciplinarian.’1 His health, however, did not improve and though a permanent job would have been reassuring at the time, his ambitions were literary. The war had battered not only the physical but also the creative self and, after meeting Owen, he no longer saw himself as a poet. Criticism, satirical verse and translation – the minor, but no less important, writers’ roles – all beckoned.
He continued writing weekly for The New Witness. After the war, its editorial policy, laid out in G. K. Chesterton’s column ‘At the Sign of the World’s End’, was to attack capitalism, inequality and hedonism. It was in favour of the ownership of small businesses and small properties and fair redistribution of wealth by means of liberal government reforms; both readers and contributors tended to belong to the Reform Club – the most effective being the divorce reformer E. S. P. Haynes. Osbert Sitwell called The New Witness a ‘queer bastard Catholic-Socialist-ultra-Conservative paper’.2 A public bicker about the war started between Charles and Osbert Sitwell. That October in the periodical The Nation, Sitwell delivered a scathing review of Mr Punch’s History of the Great War, a fat anthology culled from the pages of Punch, Charles’s favourite humorous magazine. One essay written by an officer killed in the war, was quoted out of context, ‘Every public schoolboy is serving, and one in six gives up his life. They cannot be such bad places after all.’ Sitwell extracted a perverse conclusion, ‘We may suppose, then that if one in three had given up their lives the public schools would be just twice as good. Obviously, the ideal would be to have a train wreck, in which the engine-driver and all the guards and passengers hailed from the same public school and all perish in agony.’3 He signed the review with his initials, which were the same as Sir Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch.
This enraged Charles who rushed to the defence of the dead essayist and reviewed the review two weeks later in The New Witness. He asked whether Mr O. S. and ‘the little clique he dominates, are themselves going to show us any work of positive value … No, no, no this kind of an attempt to spread and to make universal an effete aristocracy will not do: for we cannot all be aristocrats and we cannot all be effete.’4 Robert Nichols weighed in with a long peace-making letter to The New Witness, listing every important name in literary London as having been guests of the Sitwells or published in Arts and Letters: Strachey, Bell, Sassoon, Huxley, Eliot, Fry, Gide and also Charles himself. Nichols then suggested that Charles must be a little off-colour on account of his wounded leg. In his next letter Nichols apologised for mentioning the leg. Charles snapped back at once, ‘Mr Robert Nichols having withdrawn his allusion to my club foot, I must suppress what I was minded to say about his block head.’5 To follow that, in his review of Sitwell’s Argonaut and Juggernaut Charles accused Osbert of plagiarism. Sacheverell Sitwell, Osbert’s brother, leapt to his defence in the New Witness letter page, ‘may I thank the last five years for one thing, that they have produced powers of percussion more potent than a pick-axe to let light into a Scotsman’s brain.’6 In November 1919, in a review of Wheels, Edith Sitwell’s annual anthology of new verse, Charles lamented that their problem ‘is, that they won’t go round’.7
The jousting was more or less good-natured; the participants were kept informed privately of what was appearing so that Sitwell friends could raise objections at the same time as Charles replied to them. Charles’s objections to their work were both moral and aesthetic, in fact they rested on the point where the moral and artistic met. He thought Edith’s elegant arrangements of vowel sounds were largely devoid of meaning, and Osbert’s rhymes fairly facile, yet their self-promotion was astounding, mainly because they had the private income to do it. The Sitwells regarded a failure to admire their poetry as an affront to their aristocratic status, so they were amusingly easy targets, and Charles let them have it with both barrels. Charles was not the only one to see them as ridiculous figures; writing to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot privately called them the ‘Shitwells’, while Noël Coward wrote parodies of their poems and satires of their lives; and much later the critic F. R. Leavis said that the Sitwells belonged to the history of publicity rather than the history of poetry.
Charles’s attitude was in part a result of the same bitterness he had criticised in Sassoon.8 In his next review of Arts and Letters, he began, ‘In the Isles of Greece, Lord Byron reminds us, the arts of war and peace grew simultaneously. In these less fortunate islands the arts were (with all deference to the editor of The Muse in Arms) killed by war, and peace seems to express herself best by dancing on the hecatomb.’9 ‘Dancing on the hecatomb’ was a metaphor for what would later be seen as Modernism. A hecatomb was an ancient Greek sacrifice, involving the slaughter of 100 oxen; the war was a vast slaughter, the only answer to which for these particular artists, however mad it seemed, was to dance. Edith Sitwell’s strange verse did startle a weary world. In spite of his fierce criticism, Charles himself was to become a major player in the movement, as the translator of one of the greatest modernist writers. His spiky reactions expressed the pain of being dragged into the modern age, as well as grief at loss of his friends and hurt at the gossip surrounding himself and Owen. Charles saw Owen as heroic and war as an opportunity for heroism; heroism did not appeal to Modernists. Also Charles admired and emulated Punch: to reinforce his support of the magazine, he started a series of politically satirical verses for the New Witness entitled The Child’s Guide to an Understanding of the British Constitution, one of which lampooned Sir Philip Sassoon, politician, host of celebrities and a cousin of the poet. The ten verses were not offensive but Charles’s irony was often seen as too irreverent, particularly the endnote which said that the song could be sung in public to the tune of the ‘Laird of Cockpen’.
Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;
He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe,
Obsequious, modest, informed and jejeune,
A man in a million’s Sir Philip Sassoon.’10
This would have annoyed Siegfried Sassoon who may have seen the use of the word ‘swarthy’ as anti-Semitic. Charles did not stop at attacking those he knew personally. The whole post-war political scene was up for critique, particularly the ‘hard-faced men who looked as if they had done well out of the war’.11 Above all the press barons:
But everyone is not a crook
Of Bathurst, Burnham, Beaverbrook,
Cadbury, Northcliffe, Rothermere;
So everyone is not a Peer.
There are some commoners as well,
Notably Hulton and Dalziel …
‘For I was led to understand,
King, Lords and Commons rule this land.’
‘True in a sense but none the less,
They get their orders from the Press.’12
Or the following verse about Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists,
Say whose is that enormous jaw?
So grim a man I never saw.
His body glows with latent heat.
He seems some General in retreat,
Or else a Calvinistic Parson.
My child, that is Sir Edward Carson …
He loves to hear the Irish groan,
A people he has made his own.13
The situation in Ireland was extremely distressing to those who longed for peace. In 1919, after being ignored at the Paris Peace Conference, Sinn Fein declared an independent Ireland and set up a parliament in Dublin, the Dail. The British Government ruled both Sinn Fein and the Dail illegal and responded by sending in troops, ex-First World War soldiers known as The Black and Tans, who, in a bid to quash a tide of civil uproar, were involved in acts of extreme brutality against civilians. Carson dominated the Unionist cause in Ireland; but also on a personal level he was a man Charles would loath
e as the pugilistic barrister who had been employed in 1895 by Queensberry to defeat Oscar Wilde.
Some of Charles’s verses however were utterly cryptic, like this one in October 1919:
It is clear that you and I are
One a dupe and one a liar;
If the fault be proved in me,
Bullitt, where will England be?
Bullitt, had I guessed that you were
Just a Yankee interviewer,
Both your ears a-cock for tips;
I’d have locked, not licked my lips.14
William Bullitt was a US attaché at the Paris Peace Conference who was sent on a clandestine mission to Russia where he met Lenin and brokered a deal to withdraw Allied troops. Lloyd George was told nothing of this mission until after it had taken place, when it was repudiated by Western leaders. It is not clear in this verse who is the speaker, either Charles or Lloyd George. Charles probably met Bullitt in Paris in March 1919 where he let something slip that Bullitt used. Like a good civil servant Charles could not directly engage in politics or take political sides, except to be utterly loyal to his country. His verses likewise had to be cloaked in mystery. The verse continued:
Lenin I believe to be
Much the same as you or me;
But had Winston Churchill heard,
Shouldn’t I have got the bird?15
Charles collected his satires into a book entitled Snakes in the Grass and presented them to the publishers Constable & Co. However they found them too topical and too cryptic; they would date fast and need copious notes for explanation. So on 22 October 1919 Charles made Constable another suggestion, ‘a translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, now being published by the Nouvelle Revue Française … The rights are reserved in all countries by Gaston Gallimard: as you know the book is being widely read in France and England – but I have not heard of any proposal to translate it. If you entertain this idea formally I shall be glad to shew you a specimen of my translation in due course.’16 This was Charles’s first reference to Proust, but Constable had never heard of him; they replied that they did not see much use in publishing a translation of Prevost.
Marcel Proust was nearly fifty in 1919 and only just beginning to be published. Son of a Jewish mother and a provincial doctor who had become successful in Paris, he had suffered from asthma all his life and spent most of his time indoors being cosseted – reading, studying and writing. He also worked his way up the social ladder, and attended fashionable salons where he met aristocrats and famous writers like Anatole France. He published in literary magazines and in Le Figaro where in 1904 he wrote an article entitled ‘La mort des cathédrales’, in which he argued that socialism posed a greater threat to France than the Church, whose cultural and educational tradition he valued. He started to translate Ruskin but found his English not good enough, then worked on an essay, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which argued that biography was not a good tool for understanding an author’s work. From a very tight world of Parisian high society and visits to the Normandy coast, he observed and analysed people and developed an approach to memory and time that would transform European literature. A closet homosexual, he lived alone with faithful servants on the Boulevard Haussmann, a broad and lively avenue in the smart 9th arrondissement of Paris, and lined his room with cork to keep out noise and dust. From there he chronicled and satirised the decadent fin-de-siècle Paris. The first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu had been published in 1913 but, with the interruption of the war, the second much later in 1919.
At 1.2 million words Proust’s is one of the longest novels in the world. Charles did not know that it would run to seven volumes, with 3200 pages and 2000 characters, but what he read was writing relevant to himself. In the first volume, Du Côté de chez Swann, Proust wrote openly about homosexuality, apparent even in a small French village before the turn of the twentieth century. He also, less surprisingly, wove Catholicism into the fabric of the prose. This blend spoke to Charles’s heart, not to mention the sophistication of language, philosophy and art that appeared in the uncovering of the world of a sensitive young boy surrounded by adults who adored his mother. A mother who, when she read to her son, approached words with respect:
She came to them with the tone that they required, with the cordial accent which existed before they were, which dictated them, but which is not to be found in the words themselves, and by these means she smoothed away, as she read on, any harshness there might be or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.17
It was almost as if the mother breathed life and knowledge into her child through the act of reading. The detailed relationship of the word to the emotion struck a chord with both Charles’s own memories of his mother reading to him and the Chanson de Roland, which was written to be read aloud. Finding that the great length and complexity of Proust’s sentences presented an addictive challenge, Charles started translating his work privately in the autumn of 1919.
Until October he rented rooms in Chelsea and spent daylight hours in the studio of a painter, Edward Stanley Mercer,18 who was painting his portrait in oils. Mercer also painted Compton Mackenzie, who did not like the results, and Vyvyan Holland, who did. The canvas, now in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, is lifesize and it shows all of Charles except his wounded leg. It is a handsome portrait in full KOSB mess kit with jacket, medal ribbons, military bonnet and tartan trews. He is holding his captain’s cane in one hand, which displays a bloodstone signet ring, which the other rests on his knee. The head is slightly tilted and his eyes look thoughtful and dark. His mother said she never liked the picture as it made him look so deathly pale. However this is a portrait of a wounded man having to sit still for hours in some pain and who was still mourning his friends. On the other hand the banter with Mercer was jolly; he was a friend of Vyvyan Holland and knew many in his circle of friends around Robert Ross.
Charles had by now finished his translation of the Chanson de Roland, and it was soon to be published by Chapman and Hall, in December 1919. He inserted three dedicatory poems to dead friends, but the poem to Owen was changed slightly to make it less personal or inflammatory; the word ‘shame’ was cut out, so that there was no more reference to his supposed cowardice and the rhyming ‘name’ replaced it:
When in the centuries of time to come,
Men shall be happy and rehearse thy fame,
Shall I be spoken of then, or they grow dumb,
these numbers this name
Recall thy glory and forget thy shame?
His poem to Philip Bainbrigge was daring, ‘mind of my intimate mind, I claim thee lover,’ it proclaimed, and went on to absolve him of sins, ‘the scrutinous Devil/ Finds no gain in the faults of thy past behaviour’. Ian Mackenzie was the last of Charles’s friends to die in the war, not on the battlefield but from pneumonia in an Edinburgh hospital on Armistice day. Charles remembered him: ‘Like fire I saw thee/ Smiling, running, leaping, glancing and consuming.’ Ian Mackenzie was handsome and athletic, good at cricket and sent to Sandhurst by his military family, where he had met Alec Waugh in 1916. He had been stationed in Scotland during the war and never actually went to the front. Ian often visited the Waugh home in Hampstead and a volume of his poems, Forgotten Places, was published in 1919 by Arthur Waugh, Alec’s father, to which Alec Waugh wrote a posthumous introduction.
Charles’s dedication in the Chanson ran: ‘To three men; scholars, poets, soldiers, who came to their Rencesvals in September, October and November Nineteen hundred and Eighteen, I dedicate my part in a book which their friendship quickened the beginning and their example has jus
tified the ending.’19 As Peter France wrote, ‘it was precisely the translation of the Chanson de Roland that gave Charles the opportunity to write an utterly different kind of war poetry. In recreating an old epic, he was able to re-enact ancient ideals for modern times; his friends Owen, Bainbrigge, and Mackenzie had not just met pointless deaths as the war was ending, but had “met their Rencesvals”.’20 Charles sent Mrs Owen a copy of the Song of Roland, ‘the whole book is full of thoughts of Wilfred and it is a great joy for me to be able to give you a copy of it, and to feel that you may see in it what I have put in it.’21
* * *
By November Charles had found a place to rent at 136 Ebury Street, SW1, a narrow house on five floors with three rooms on each, in bad condition but worth improving. He rented it with two friends known in his letters by their surnames only: Parkes and Ashton. The latter was a young Canadian singer who was ‘thoroughly domesticated’ and was to be the housekeeper, as he could cook and sew for the other two. Meg sewed through the last week of October making curtains and tracing a border of vine leaves on them. Then on the 30th Charles appeared at Edgware with Ashton in a lorry and took away his books, which he was at last to have around him in his own home. Parcels and boxes and furniture were heaved on to the lorry and driven back to Ebury Street where for the first time Charles really set up home himself with friends. Until now he had lived with soldiers or in hospital and this new home gave him a fresh start in his life.
The neighbours were fun: Noël Coward lived nearby with his parents who ran a boarding house at number 111 Ebury Street. George Moore, novelist and playwright, also lived on the street, and Charles visited both. Moore, the prolific Irish writer, held a strong belief that literature had a high moral role, while Coward the precocious actor who was already writing plays, believed that the primary aim of all the arts was entertainment. Coward shared Charles’s views on the Sitwells and hilarious evenings were spent improvising spoof Sitwell poetry. Coward concocted a book of poems by Mrs Hernia Whittlebot (Edith) who had two adoring brothers, Gob and Sago. The introduction explained that the thin and angular Whittlebot was ‘busy preparing for publication of her new books, Gilded Sluts and Garbage. She breakfasts on onions and Vichy water.’22